Skool Finds You a Member. Skool Keeps 30% of Everything That Member Ever Pays — And It's On by Default.

Open a new tab. Go to Settings, then Discovery. Look at Growth Boost. If you have never touched that switch, Skool is very likely entitled to 30% of every payment made by any member it sent you — this month, next month, and every month after that until they cancel.

Skool's own payments FAQ states that Growth Boost is default ON, can be toggled off from Settings > Discovery, and that the cut applies to recurring charges for as long as the member's subscription is active.

That second half is the part that changes the math.

The arithmetic nobody runs before launch

Growth Boost pushes your community to the top of Skool's Discovery search results and puts it into paid ads Skool runs off-site at its own cost. Skool's help centre frames the trade plainly: the group gets shown to your ideal member in Discovery results and off-site ads, and "You pay the 30% commission only when Skool gets you a member." Pay nothing for customers you bring in yourself.

As a customer acquisition cost, 30% is defensible. As a permanent haircut on recurring revenue, it is a different product entirely.

Run it on a $99-a-month community on the Pro plan. The commission takes $29.70. Pro's transaction fee is 2.9% + $0.30 on payments up to $899. Skool spells out that it deducts the commission "and fees", so a member who joins through Discovery on a $99 a month community leaves you about $66 a month, for as long as they stay.

On a $50 membership, the commission alone is $15 to Skool before fees. On the $9 Hobby plan, where the transaction fee is 10% plus 30 cents, the combined bite on a Discovery member is brutal relative to the ticket.

Now extend it. A member who stays 18 months at $99 pays you roughly $1,780 instead of $1,782 gross — minus about $535 in commission alone. That is not a finder's fee. That is a revenue share.

Two help docs, one default, no agreement

Here is where it gets awkward. Skool charges a 30% commission on members it sends you, and two of its own help docs disagree about whether that is switched on by default.

The payments FAQ says default ON. Independent trackers of the feature read it the same way. Growth Boost is on by default, found under Settings, Discovery. Skool says Growth Boost is on by default and can be turned off under Settings → Discovery.

And almost nobody writing about Skool pricing is telling creators this. Four of the five written guides on page one of Google do not mention Growth Boost at all, and the fifth describes a 30% commission under a different name, without saying whether it is switched on for you.

What actually counts as "a member Skool sent you"

Broader than most owners assume. One community-run explainer on Skool's own platform notes that unless Growth Boost is turned off, Skool takes at least 30% from members who join through your profile page or by searching and finding you through the Discovery page — and flags the detail people miss: if someone joins through your profile or Discovery and then buys a high or low ticket offer inside your community, Skool also takes its cut of that. They are effectively your affiliate.

Attribution is last touch, with a 14-day window for Skool's network. Which means a member who already knew you, saw your group in Discovery, and joined two days later can count as Skool's.

Telling, too: Skool itself does not recommend Growth Boost for high-ticket offers.

You can also bid higher. Up to 70%.

The feature is young. Skool announced "Growth Boost is LIVE!" on 9 June 2026, pitching off-site ads for communities and a 30% commission "like an affiliate." Skool pays for the promotion and takes a commission only on members who come through its network and pay: 30% by default, up to 70% if you choose, on every recurring payment.

Without a setting of your own, 30% applies. Raise your rate and you buy more exposure by handing Skool a bigger share. At 70%, a $45-a-month member leaves you $13.50 before the transaction fee. For members who already joined, a new rate changes nothing — in Skool's wording, "they're grandfathered at the % they joined at."

Why this is suddenly loud

A WP-Tonic episode published October 12 asks why creators are leaving Skool in the final quarter of 2026. Host Jonathan Denwood opens by saying Skool has made major changes to the platform and added major costs, and notes the cut sits on top of the standard processing fees — 10% on Hobby, 2.9% on Pro.

Co-host Kurt von Ahnen's framing is harsher. Skool, he argues, is a machine that will "charge the talent for possible exposure, and then just scrape the profits right off the top." He still rates the platform as a cheap place to test an idea — a $9-a-month proof of concept remains attractive, he says, but the moment you become dependent on their marketplace engine and boosted exposure, you are throwing money after bad.

That is opinion, not fact. The default is fact.

The decision, not the discovery

Switching it off is not free either. Turning Growth Boost off from Settings > Discovery also removes your community from Discovery, so you lose that source of free traffic. Members you bring in yourself through your own audience, ads or links only carry the standard fee.

So the real question is what share of your growth you can actually source yourself. If Discovery is filling your community, 30% of something beats 100% of nothing. If your members arrive from your email list, your YouTube channel and your paid ads, you are paying a tax on traffic you generated.

One pricing guide puts the point about as well as it can be put: whether it is worth 30% depends entirely on how much of your growth you can source yourself, and that is a decision to make deliberately rather than discover on a payout statement.

Settings. Discovery. Go look.